Building the software

Local Build

Building with Docker

Blackbox exporter is configured via a configuration file and command-line flags (such as what configuration file to load, what port to listen on, and the logging format and level).

Blackbox exporter can reload its configuration file at runtime. If the new configuration is not well-formed, the changes will not be applied.
A configuration reload is triggered by sending a SIGHUP to the Blackbox exporter process or by sending a HTTP POST request to the /-/reload endpoint.

The timeout of each probe is automatically determined from the scrape_timeout in the Prometheus config, slightly reduced to allow for network delays.
This can be further limited by the timeout in the Blackbox exporter config file. If neither is specified, it defaults to 10 seconds.

Prometheus Configuration

The blackbox exporter needs to be passed the target as a parameter, this can be
done with relabelling.